


Midas and the Mutants

by leaves_girl



Category: Smallville
Genre: Alien Biology, Alien Clark Kent, Daddy Issues, Gen, Happy Ending, There's no such thing as plot holes, Time Travel, just alien plots
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-24
Updated: 2020-11-01
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:48:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 19,930
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26956837
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leaves_girl/pseuds/leaves_girl
Summary: In a desperate bid to save Earth, scientists from 33.1 send a message to the past, warning Lex Luthor about his new friend.  “He’s not what you think.  He’s not what he thinks either.”
Relationships: Clark Kent & Lex Luthor
Comments: 3
Kudos: 13





	1. A Hurricane that Started Turning when You were Young

**November, 2006:**

“What if she invites him to Thanksgiving?” Alekhya asked, staring at the surveillance photos in horror: Lionel Luthor’s hand was on Martha Kent’s back.

“She won’t,” Meg scoffed from her own desk, too obsessed with entering subjects’ personal histories into her new matrix to even look over.

“But what if she does?” Alekhya wished she didn’t feel the need to stare at the photos herself, but this was important. Lionel Luthor’s hand was resting _gently_ on Martha Kent’s _lower_ back, her _bare_ lower back because she was wearing a _little black dress_ and had obviously _made an effort._

“She knows what he is. She knows he’s killed people. He drugged his own son, got him committed, fried his brain. He set off a bomb to try to kill Chloe Sullivan, one of her son’s closest friends. All of this to cover up how he murdered his own parents for insurance money. Martha knows all of this. She won’t let Lionel eat Thanksgiving dinner with her child.”

“And as a rebuttal, I offer...,” Alekhya gestured to the computer, pulling up another surveillance photo of the two embracing. (In the hallway of all places, and he had to know there were cameras. Was this some kind of power play?) The next photo showed Lionel kissing Martha’s cheek. The photo after that showed Lionel kissing _not_ her cheek, and for someone who knew what kind of scumbag he was and wouldn’t let him near her precious child, Martha was sure letting his tongue go a lot of places.

Meg remained unimpressed. “Listen, this may be a surprise to you, but women of a certain age, recently widowed and still in possession of healthy sex drives, may find a man like Lionel attractive. He’s a suave-yet-dangerous billionaire; there’s a certain appeal. That doesn’t mean she’ll make him part of the family. She’s reasonably intelligent.”

“She’s also crazy,” Alekhya disagreed. “She found an alien and instead of, say, warning humanity that we’re not alone in the universe, she adopted it.” Sure, _now_ they had research to show a Kryptonian child would be able to survive on a human diet and wouldn’t carry any diseases with him that might wipe out human life. Back _then,_ though, Martha really should have given the CDC a heads up and let her pediatrician know. “Lionel’s going through personality changes. She might believe he’s turning over a new leaf.”

“And on the other side of that new leaf is the space ghost that keeps kidnapping her son. Lionel’s connection to Jor-El won’t make him appear any more trustworthy. What’s Lionel going to say, ‘I may be a convicted murderer, but you can trust me now because I’m sharing a body with the alien who impregnated you before killing your unborn daughter and branding Clark to try to make him take over the planet?’”

“That’s not exactly how that happened.”

“I know, I’m the one who went through the 35B subject’s memories in the first place. What I’m saying is: Quit gossiping about Martha Kent’s sex life and get back to writing the report.” Meg returned to her indexing. Tiffany hadn’t even looked over from her own computer during this exchange. They didn’t understand.

“I’m not gossiping, I’m asking for your professional opinion. The research suggests that Kryptonian’s filial piety is hard-wired and overpowering. Imprinting on Jonathan Kent as a father figure might be the only reason Clark hasn’t submitted to Jor-El’s will and taken over the planet yet. But now Jonathan is dead, and Martha is pursuing romantic relations with another man. I know kissing someone isn’t the same as asking them to be your son’s new dad. But what about if she invites him to Thanksgiving?”

 _That_ had finally caught Tiffany’s attention, and Meg was looking a little pale. Alekhya smiled in vindication: she’d been right; this _was_ serious. Then the panic hit: crap, this was _serious_. “Well, it would obviously take more than one instance,” Meg objected. But Lionel had been hanging around the Kent farm a lot over the past year. “Surely it would involve a long process of conditioning, maybe some triggering stimuli like calling Clark ‘son’ and giving him advice.” Lionel was patronizing in most senses, and had a habit of calling people 'son’. Meg’s voice was a higher, more nervous pitch as she continued, “And the Kryptonians wouldn’t design something easy to hijack; there might have to be some consent involved like the son taking the advice that the potential father surrogate offers.” There had been that mess with the woman who murdered someone just to frame Lex. Lionel had ‘helped’ by implying something oedipal about Lex dating brunettes even though Lillian had been a redhead. Clark had taken Lionel’s advice. It hadn’t been good advice, but he had taken it. Meg looked between the other two scientists helplessly. “We’re already stuck doing secondary research in a basement. Do we really want to be the ones to present Lex Luthor with a security threat assessment revolving around roast turkey?”

“End of the world then. Okay, good to know, I’ll add it to the report.” Alekhya did close the window on the surveillance footage to take another crack at the report, and she could hear Tiffany going back to her papers, but out of the corner of her eye she could see Meg stalled out, thinking.

“Is Lionel doing it on purpose?” Meg asked. “Could he have stolen our research somehow?”

“No one’s watching us. No one respects secondary research enough to bother spying on it,” Alekhya said. “Everyone in my old department calls Project Perses ‘The Punishment Project’ when I go visit. If Lionel was working off intel, he didn’t get it from here.” But a billionaire falling for a farmer’s widow did seem a little unlikely.

Meg grimaced in realization. “Maybe he’s collaborating with Jor-El. The two share a brain, sort of. Who knows how much they’ve told each other.”

Comforting thought. “Hey, maybe you should stop cross-indexing or whatever and help me write. I think our submission deadline just got moved from Ragnarok to ASAP. We need to rewrite our abstract. Something catchier.”

“What, like ‘According to our thorough review of the literature, your friend is one of the aliens you’re looking for, your girlfriend is a witch, and Mineral-3 is controlled through wishes’? On the front page? If we’re safe from scrutiny now, we certainly won’t be once something with a front page like that makes its way upstairs,” Meg said.

“A lit review isn’t much of a security risk when Luthor Senior is being possessed by a primary source.”

Meg disagreed. “It’ll be stolen off the Director’s desk before he has a chance to read it.” 

“What’s Lex going to do?” Tiffany finally decided to contribute to the conversation. “Even if our report is perfect and Lex reads it immediately and believes us, what could he do about it?”

“He can’t kill Martha,” Meg asserted. “Clark might reorient to her lover as sole parental figure.”

Alekhya was offended. “I wasn’t suggesting we should kill some nice lady for sleeping with the wrong guy.”

Tiffany scoffed. “I’m sorry, were you under the impression that we could afford to care about morality here? Meg, you reviewed all the experiments from Level 3 to 33.1. How many human rights violations did you uncover? We didn’t call the feds about a single one, didn’t even discuss the possibility of shutting them down, because LuthorCorp needs them. Lex needs the knowledge and tools to protect humanity, no matter the cost. But now that it’s your own soul on the line, suddenly you’re squeamish? How dare you! So killing Martha won’t work. Okay. We’ll think of something else.”

“We’ve got a lot of mind control options,” Meg offered. “The Chesterton Stone broke, but there are a lot of mutants out there who could get Martha to break up with Lionel or make him walk off a cliff, assuming we could convince them.”

Given the way LuthorCorp treated mutants, Alekhya thought there were better odds of whoever they found making the three of them walk off a cliff instead. “We could probably convince Martha to stop seeing him on our own. She might not believe us about her love life dooming humanity, but she’ll believe that we know Clark’s secret and can hurt him with it. We could blackmail her into joining a nunnery.” 

Tiffany shook her head. “Anything relying on blackmail, bribery, kidnapping, convincing, any ‘human plan’, Lionel will recognize and counter. Any plan using alien artifacts or metahumans, Jor-El will recognize and counter. Whoever he is, whether it’s Lionel or Jor-El in charge, he holds all the cards.”

“We get the first move, though,” Alekhya reminded them. “Lex was clever about this. His dad could probably pull together the resources to spy on anything he chooses to, but he can’t spy on everything at once. He’d focus on the cutting-edge new studies, anything with human test subjects, the sort of studies with ‘promising but inconclusive’ results.” Ah, the good old days, when she was part of a groundbreaking team and Lex would come talk to them personally in shining labs that were bathed in green light. Now she was one of three women combing LuthorCorp’s archives in a repurposed break room in the basement. She sighed. “All I’m saying is that Luthors are drawn to a certain aesthetic, and we're not currently projecting it. It’s the perfect cover: as far as anyone knows we’re just the scapegoats our departments offered up after Lex’s latest corporate-wide dressing down. They think he had a conniption.”

Meg rolled her eyes. “He did have a conniption. We are here to suffer.” 

Maybe, but Lex had looked incredible when he ordered their suffering: dark suit, lilac shirt, crooning softly into his microphone as scores of scientists quaked in terror. _“I confess I’m confused. I could have sworn that when I asked all of LuthorCorp’s esteemed scientists together, I used the word 'collaboration.’ You’re all at least tangentially researching the same mineral, after all. So, let’s hear it: How does one mineral produce hundreds of completely different, completely inexplicable superpowers in different subjects? No? You were too busy taking turns bragging about your own experiments to even notice?_ ” It had been seven months ago and Alekhya still remembered every word. 

“ _Did you notice that humanity is at war? A year ago two aliens landed a ship on Earth and started attacking us, and the humans couldn’t stop them. They decided to leave, but we don’t know why. We don’t know when they’ll come back._ ” Lex had a charisma about him, a way of tearing into people that made even amoral scientists sit up straight and try to do better.

“ _There are too many questions that we haven’t even tried to answer. I know that every scientist here wants to go back to their labs and poke something with a meteor-tipped scalpel until the secrets of the universe come pouring out. However, I would like to propose that we take a strategic look at the situation confronting us, because if we don’t figure this out soon, there might not be any humans left this time next year, and then who will give you your Nobel?_ ”

He’d paused then to examine the crowd, maybe searching out competence or maybe sensing weakness. For all that Alekhya admired the man and trusted him to protect humanity, she didn’t know what went through his mind. “ _Hicks, Gulliani, Karpov, your departments gave the most presentations at this little show-and-tell, so I assume you have enough scientists to spare one each on a side project. I find myself asking again: Collaboration. Connections. Patterns. Look at what we already know and what it means for us as a species.”_

The named department heads hadn’t picked her to offer up for the project yet, but Lex must have known because his eyes had seemed to pierce Alekhya in a way that still made her shiver remembering it months later as he ordered, “ _Find us a way out of this horror show before more people die._ ”

“We’re too late.” For someone who told them to use any means necessary, Tiffany sure shut down the brainstorming fast. “Clark’s spent over five years being conditioned to lie to Lex no matter what. How many people has he revealed his powers to by now? Friends, strangers, mutants, murderers, he reveals his powers and lets them live. Remember Alicia Baker? Morgan Edge? But Lex finds out, and Clark lets Lionel run 700 volts through his brain to make him forget.” “That’s not exactly how…” Meg murmured, and Tiffany ignored her. “This planet was doomed the moment Johnathan Kent told his son to never trust a Luthor. We’re years too late. But we don’t have to be.”

Time travel? That was... incredibly possible given the breadth of presentation in the Mineral-3 subjects. They had even come across a few temporal anomalies while compiling the report, but as far as Alekhya knew all of the subjects involved were deceased or depowered. 

“But… the Midas Effect.” Figures Meg was smart enough to keep up, even if she was too shocked to form whole sentences. 

Alekhya was right there with her; when she woke up this morning she hadn’t planned to be a human sacrifice. “Any means necessary, huh?”

Tiffany held firm. “Even if we could find a way to stop Lionel and Jor-El, to bring Clark onto LuthorCorp’s side and never lose another human to Mineral-3 or anything else Kryptonian, that won’t help the people already dead. Lex entrusted us with finding Smallville’s secrets, and we didn’t find them soon enough. Do we really want Dark Thursday to be our legacy?

“Look at the numbers: Lex Luthor’s first contact with a temporal anomaly was October of 2001.” She waved the relevant casefile, because of course she had it. She’d probably been planning to spring this on them for weeks so of course she was ready. “We give him the report _then_ , with all the information he needs to fix this. We stop the Mineral-3 deaths, about four per month from then to now, so a little over two hundred fifty lives saved including my son’s, plus another fifty from the 2005 landing, plus 12,000 lives from Dark Thursday. Plus however many millions will die when Lionel and Jor-El have Clark conquer Earth. How much death and suffering has LuthorCorp caused trying to save the world? Either we’re willing to step up and offer ourselves to the cause, or we are what every sanctimonious farmer and hard-done-by mutant accuses us of being.”

Tiffany was so smug, getting to keep the moral high ground while asking them all to die to bring her son back. It was over 12,000 lives in exchange for Alekhya’s, what kind of asshole would she be not to take that bargain now that Tiffany had offered it? The relationship between Lionel and Martha was probably just the excuse she needed to ask them. 

“With the quarantine procedures, we haven’t had a chance to do a proper study!” Meg objected. “We don’t know what could happen; what if we rip spacetime and make a black hole that swallows the planet?”

Alekhya perked up a bit, hoping the ‘grave consequences to messing with forces beyond our comprehension’ argument might get them out of this.

But no, Tiffany had already prepared a rebuttal. “Subject 33-014P.” Alekhya winced. 14P had been the start of their theory: the boy who could split himself in two, doubling his own mass without changing the mass or energy of his environment. More to the point, he could _shed_ half his mass at will without setting off an explosion that, running a 200lb boy through the classic E=mc2 , should have reduced North America to rubble. So many mutants had powers that skirted the laws of quantum mechanics when a similar, simpler effect would have wiped Smallville off the map. Mineral-3 wasn’t a blank canvas to paint a wish onto; it was a prompt window in a computer program that only generated certain types of results. They could wish for a second chance if they wanted to. People would suffer for it, just like any time Mineral-3 was used, but the human race would carry on.

Alekhya admitted defeat. “Lex did tell us to find an answer ‘before more people died.’ I bet he’d be happy that we’re taking him literally.”

With Alekhya’s agreement, Tiffany turned to coax Meg. “It might not even count as making a wish of our own if we piggyback off the 2001 precog. We can even try routing through an unpresented subject if you want an extra shield.” Finally, hesitantly, Meg nodded.

Alekhya walked over and lay a comforting hand on her shoulder. “I mean, realistically we wouldn’t have lived much past Thanksgiving anyway,” she consoled. Then she went to retrieve a nutter butter from the vending machine in the corner. No sense in counting calories anymore.

“Maybe it’ll be that we go back in time and our old selves die and we replace them,” Meg said. “Or if it’s just the report going back, maybe our current selves die but our old selves live long, successful lives. Or, didn’t the subject of the 2001 temporal anomaly die? Couldn’t that be enough?” She sighed. “It’ll probably feel like falling; I’m afraid of heights.”

“I’m scared of spiders,” Alekhya offered.

“I’m scared of accepting that my son is dead,” Tiffany chimed in. Well, great, she was going to be authentic and honest about it.

Two mornings later, Tiffany had acquired a breadbox-sized mineral-3 specimen, along with a comatose young man. Meg and Alekhya eyed her curiously. “Blackmail,” she explained. They nodded in understanding. “And I promised to have him back to Summerholt by three, assuming this fails and there is a three o’clock.”

In her old department they might have tried hooking the mineral up to a current or mixing it into a solution to inject into the boy on the gurney. Here, each woman pricked her finger until it bled and together they reached out their hands towards the rock. As predicted, it started to glow. “Brace yourselves, it’s time to wish on a shooting star.” _May the gods be merciful, just this once_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title based on[When You Were Young](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ff0oWESdmH0)by The Killers, released in 2006.


	2. Desperate for Changing, Starving for Truth

**October, 2001:**

Lex drove down the dusty autumn road more slowly than he usually would. Clark had asked him to be careful this week, said someone close to him would die. If driving slowly was the price of Clark calling them close, Lex would pay it. 

Lex had been stunned when Clark admitted Casandra Carver could see the future; the boy normally lied about that sort of thing, and badly. ( _Guess what Lex, your evil twin who robbed a bank was actually a teenage girl. Turns out she had a bone condition, all very scientific, don’t worry about the hair._ ) Lex had honored this rare show of honesty by paying the woman a visit, but the results had been disappointing. The woman completely refused to tell any fortune but his own, and he already knew what the future held for Luthors. Lex remembered his first day in Smallville, staring through his windshield at Clark’s shocked face, thinking ‘Of course this is how I die: completely my own fault, taking out some innocent man just because he was near me.’ It was waking up again on the riverbank that had broken the rules of nature and fate. He wished Ms. Carver had been willing to tell him about his friend. Lex didn’t need to hear the Luthor future. He needed Clark’s. 

His cellphone vibrated in his pocket, and he pulled over at the edge of a pasture. The caller would probably hear the cows’ plaintive bellowing, but the whole world had heard about his banishment already. “Lex Luthor.”

“Mr. Luthor, glad I caught you!” a man chirped. “This is Deputy Morales. You called about the littering on your property?”

“I called in a report about a dead body in a pond at the edge of my property, yes,” Lex corrected, gripping the phone tightly. ( _The body of suspected murderer Sean Kelvin, Officer, encased in my miraculously frozen pond. // Well, Mr. Luthor, that happens sometimes in small towns._ )

“Well, Mr. Luthor, I’m pleased to tell you it’s just a scarecrow. Saw you speeding out of here as we got in, or I would’ve come up to tell you in person.”

“That’s impossible.” He’d seen the body himself, put his hands on the unnatural ice and stared down at the boy’s frozen face turned desperately towards the surface. He should have insisted the police come out immediately, but they had been busy with a newer murder. The body might have already been there for a week, they said, it could wait another day. He’d set a gardener on watch. He wondered whether Mr. Durie was killed and in a ditch or paid off and in Tahiti.

“If you say so, Mr. Luthor. I’d never dream of taking a private citizen to task for how he navigates his own driveway.”

“No, not that. The body’s impossible. It wasn’t littering. It was a corpse, I saw it.”

“Tell you what,” the deputy offered, “We can upgrade it to vandalism, maybe.”

Lex really wanted to yell, but he didn’t know what to say, how to change this.

“Mr. Luthor? It was probably just some teens daring each other to pull a prank. You do have the biggest house for quite a few miles, paints a bit of a target.”

“Or maybe it just drifted over from a nearby field,” Lex offered, digging two fingernails into the pad of his thumb to steady himself.

“Hmm, not likely. Well, it was probably a working scarecrow originally, but someone cut it down and spray-painted it’s chest with the letters LEX, SUX,” he coughed back a chuckle, “COX.”

Lex switched off, thumbnail now digging into fingers. “I’m assuming that’ll be in the Smallville Ledger tomorrow.”

“Freedom of the press,” the deputy agreed blithely.

Wonderful, ‘Luthor Scared of Scarecrow’ would be on the front page of tomorrow’s paper, the only question whether it was below the most recent murder or above it. “Thank you, Deputy Morales, for taking the time to come look.” If the past six weeks were any indication, staying in the good graces of the law would be as important here in Smallville as it was in Metropolis, if for very different reasons. 

The matter was nearly closed then. The new generator was installed, and the one Sean Kelvin had broken was being studied. Pictures of the frozen corpse were saved to a zip disc in his Room Of Secrets, the actual corpse was gone, and the person watching the corpse was gone. Only one thing was left to deal with.

His phone buzzed again, the display showing a familiar number. “Dad, perfect timing. It’s almost as if you were watching me.” Mr. Durie was in Tahiti then, probably. That was one small relief in this debacle; he’d hate to have an employee murdered by an ice zombie for following his orders.

“It’s every father’s most cherished responsibility to watch over his child,” Lionel Luthor agreed. “I just heard about the most recent murder. Blindfolded and strangled with a piano wire, was it? It’s terrible, the violence people can inflict on each other these days.”

Maybe the call wasn’t just gloating about stealing a murderer’s corpse, then. “Be honest, Dad. People were just as vicious back in your day. After all, you were there.”

“Now Lex, what did I teach you about politeness?” Lionel brightly scolded.

“You taught me to use it as a tool when I want something.”

“I’m sure I taught you to always be polite.” _And to always want something_ , Lex completed silently. “No, it had to do with princes…” 

“Punctuality is the politeness of princes.” 

“That was it!” Lionel crowed. “Well, I suppose you’re right, that’s not about common courtesy at all. More about how timing is everything.” 

And they were back to the corpse-napping. “Did you have a reason for interrupting my day?” 

“I called an investors’ meeting for Monday the 28th, here in Metropolis at 9am. Don’t be late!” With that cheery admonition, the line went dead. 

Lex pulled back onto the road. This was his life now, fielding ominous calls from a spiteful father, surrounded by people who would rather see a Luthor taken down a peg than deal with the deaths of their neighbors. He somehow ended up downtown instead of at the plant. It was just as well, a parking space was open in front of the flower shop and Lex had another card to sign.

Bells above the door announced his entrance. “Well, Lex Luthor, this is a treat!” Nell Potter stood from where she had been arranging a basket of pink and yellow daylilies on a lower shelf. As she turned, she wiped both hands on her bright red apron and offered a bright white smile. “What brings you in today? Out for a drive?”

“I was hoping to send my condolences to the family of the man who was killed.” Thus began a conversation very similar to one last week and the week before that. ( _Witness the homo sapien smallvillis. Here, the adult female protects the troop’s young by presenting her back to all dangers and sounding a distinctive ‘all clear.’ Let’s see if we can hear it._ ) 

“Oh yes, Jim Gage, he used to buy his wife lilacs before they broke up.” She bustled to the other room for one of the oblong wicker baskets Lex preferred for these occasions. “Such a shame. You never think of that sort of thing happening in a place like this, you know?” 

“Well, I grew up in Metropolis,” Lex demurred, watching as she brought the basket up to her worktable, then retrieved flowers from various coolers along the back wall: lilacs, hydrangeas, baby’s breath, ferns, along with a green clay base. “How’s everyone taking it?”

“Lana still feels so guilty.” She tutted, and Lex hummed a question. “Oh, you didn’t hear?” The woman’s hands sped over the basket, adding flowers, nudging the angle here, taking a frond out to snip with her scissors before returning it there. “She was volunteering at Smallville Retirement Center. She turned her back for a minute, and someone kidnapped the man she was working with, right out of his wheelchair!” Nell moved with the surety of having made flower arrangements for hundreds of funerals. “Apparently the old man killed someone back in ‘45 and this young guy got it in his head to abduct him and then go kill Jim Gage the same way.” This basket was a little less effusive than Jenna Barnum’s from last week, with more hydrangeas and fewer lilies, befitting the death of a middle-aged man as opposed to a girl of seventeen. “They found the old man’s body in the Kent’s grain silo this morning. Let’s hope that’s the end of it.” Apart from the lilacs, the end result was almost identical to Rose Greer’s bouquet from two week’s back. “Now, you’ll want the matte black card with the silver lettering, right?” 

The bells above the door chimed again, announcing the arrival of a man in red flannel. “Tell me you can hook us up, Nell, the wife’s got a banquet next month up in…” Bill Ross paused, frowning. He looked from Lex to Nell and back again like he’d caught them at something salacious, as though the worktable didn’t separate them by four feet, as though the basket didn’t completely explain the purpose of Lex’s visit, as though Nell hadn’t sent flowers to Lex’s hospital room when he was nine. “I see you’re busy.” The man turned and left.

Nell pursed her lips and ran a hand through her hair, visibly searching for a way to smooth things over. “Well, um…”

“The card is perfect,” Lex ignored the interlude as he carefully signed it. “Impeccable taste as always.” It wasn’t her fault after all, or something either of them could fix. “Speaking of perfect taste, when should we be expecting the first delivery up at the manor for Lana’s sweet fifteen?”

“Oh, I’m having it all delivered here,” she assured him. “I actually own the empty theater next door; I can store everything myself until the perishables start showing up, say noon of the Friday before?”

“If you think that will give you enough time,” Lex agreed. “But I’d like to send a moving truck that morning; I can’t imagine making you carry it all yourself.”

“Thank you, Lex, that sounds wonderful! And I’ll be sure to send these flowers over this afternoon, just as soon as I can ask which chapel the memorial is in.”

Lex was almost reluctant to leave. However tasteless it was, he took a fierce comfort in the way funeral flowers made the people of Smallville acknowledge their dead. He couldn’t help himself from asking about strange story after strange story, putting flowers on corpse after corpse, like getting people to admit the madness of it all was the necessary first step to keeping everyone safe. Even now, Lex had an instinctive desire to head over to the Kent farm and watch them struggle to explain how a seventy-three-year-old, wheelchair-bound, convicted felon ended up smothered in their grain silo. It was the same impulse that had made him show Clark the Porsche on Wednesday, just to watch the boy lie some more. Clark had scolded Lex for not ‘focusing on the future.’ 

“Actually, Nell, could you make me up a bouquet? Something nice smelling and long-lasting but not too showy. It’s for a blind woman, you see.” He’d be even more late to work, but Mr. Sullivan never minded. ( _Alright, Clark, we’ll do it your way, let the old crone tell my fortune. Let’s focus on the future.)_

* * *

hanging by a moment here with you

* * *

“You don't pretend to be friends with somebody, Lex. You either are or you aren't.” Behind Duncan Allenmeyer stood the sun-drenched grounds of Excelsior Academy, on one of the worst days of Lex’s life. “I'm gonna turn them in,” the dead boy proclaimed. 

Lex took a deep breath, trying to feel his own bed beneath him. He didn’t wake up. Duncan turned, spotting Queen and his two cronies. “I thought you said you were gonna handle this,” Queen menaced. 

It took Duncan an agonizing moment to catch on, to turn towards Lex with disbelief and demand, “You told them?” 

“I’m so sorry, Duncan.” He’d spent a long time hiding from this moment, but if he couldn’t say it here in his own dream… “I never should have made a deal with them, I was just so tired of it all. I wish I’d been as brave as you.” 

“I ... I never felt that way, not when you were my friend.” Duncan was now facing the wrong direction, turned to follow the path Lex had walked five years before. “Get out of my way,” he demanded. 

Lex saw Duncan getting pushed down and beaten by what appeared to be thin air. Queen and his friends cheered, and then watched, and then started to protest as Duncan’s face got bloodier. _I’m not here anymore. This is the past, and there’s nothing I can do about it._

Inevitably, Duncan staggered to his feet. “Get away from me!” he shouted, but Lex ran to him anyway. _No._ “You want to be one of them so badly, Lex?” Lex tried to grab the boy, but his hand passed straight through. _Please, no._ “Is that it? You can't stand being a loser like me?” Duncan continued backing towards his death, and Lex followed step for step into the road but the boy’s arm kept slipping through his fingers like smoke and there was nothing Lex could do. Maybe if he’d figured out Clark’s trick with the Porsche...“Well, congratulations, buddy. Now you're their friend.” He could only watch helplessly as a beat-up station wagon bore down on them both. “And you can all go-” Flicker.

“Wait, why are Warrior Angel and Black Diamond fighting? I mean, they're friends. It doesn't make any sense.” Lex backed up a few steps, blinking, and looked around. It was still Excelsior and still autumn, but it must be earlier because Duncan was still alive and talking. “No, I didn't have any money that week. Why? What happened?” And since Duncan was still talking to Invisible Lex, apparently Real Lex was still dreaming.

“Well, as edifying as this trip down memory lane has been, it’s time for me to wake up,” Lex tried, not really expecting anything to happen. Flicker.

Suddenly, the light turned grey and two of them were inside the building, walking downstairs towards the chemistry lab. “What are you gonna do when you get out of here?” Duncan asked. Lex peered at the boy. Was this a response to what Lex had said? “Then what?” Probably not. “Are you gonna do it?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t remember what I said I was going to do,” Lex admitted to his oblivious audience. “Still, unless it was ‘Run a shit factory-’”

“I'm gonna help people, like Warrior Angel,” Duncan interrupted.

Lex had to smile. “I’m sure you would have been a hero.”

“No, no, I don't mean like the cape and stuff.” Duncan corrected, and Lex again had to quash the idea that the boy was talking to him now instead of him then. “I'm talking like a doctor or a lawyer or something.”

“That’s what I meant, too.”

Duncan nodded. “Yeah ... working pro bono for the poor.”

There was something poignant about staring at a ruined future. “That’s right, we said we’d be partners, didn’t we?”

The dead boy continued talking to the past. “Why? What's your dad got against poor people?”

Lex frowned, looking around the stairwell landing. “Was that today? Are we headed towards-”

“What do you think?” Duncan interrupted.

Lex sighed. “I think this wouldn’t be a proper nightmare if we weren’t headed towards the cause of your death.” 

“Allenmeyer and Luthor?” Duncan proposed.

“It would have been amazing,” Lex confirmed, pouring all his sincerity and regret into the words even if the figment of his imagination couldn’t hear them.

Duncan smiled. “Deal. Now all we gotta do is graduate in one piece.”

Lex winced. “Did you really say that? Because if I just dreamed it up, I apologize for my poor-” At that point, Invisible Lex must have heard Queen’s crew, because Duncan was ushered into an empty classroom. Lex watched as the boys sneaked away with the pilfered test. 

“What are they doing?” Duncan asked eventually, peeking from behind the door. Lex shook his head, but didn’t answer. Flicker.

The three popular boys were once again visible sneaking down the hallway. Duncan peeked from behind the door and asked again, “What are they doing?”

“They’re proving their academic inferiority by stealing answers to a test they aren’t smart enough to study for.” Lex managed a weak smirk, and then the world flickered again.

“What are they doing?” Duncan asked.

This was getting old. What was it he had said the real time? “Stealing answers to the midterm,” Lex tried. Flicker.

“What are they doing?” Duncan asked.

Lex paused for a long moment, then shrugged and slowly repeated, “Stealing… answers… to--,” Flicker.

“What are they doing?” Duncan asked.

“Stealing answers?” Lex tried, bracing himself for a flicker. That seemed to be the right response, though. “To something other than midterms?” He let out a sigh when the scene finally continued.

“But they could get expelled!” Duncan protested. “Are you sure?”

“Absolutely,” Lex decided. “I just wish I knew what you meant.” Flicker.

Duncan smiled. “Deal. Now all we gotta do is graduate in one piece.” Flicker.

Duncan was again ushered into an empty classroom, but this time he stalled, frozen in the doorway. Lex walked past him into the dark. 

Someone had wheeled a TV cart to the front of the room. The screen glowed blue and women’s voices murmured through the speakers.

_“It just seems cruel.” “Really? After everything we did to gather the data, this is your line in the sand?” “That was necessary, this isn’t.” “The report has over fifty diagrams.” “Not important ones. Do you think he can’t figure out on his own what an octagon looks like?” “We only get one shot at this. Do you want to hang the fate of humanity on whether Lex Luthor is a visual learner?” “Fine, we can use the speculum.” “Ew, no! Wash your hands first!”_

Eventually the blue screen double wiped like eyelids being pried back, revealing a look up at three women. One spoke.

“Listen, Lex Luthor of 2001 if you can hear this, a lot of strange and horrible things are about to happen. Someday, you’ll ask your research department to figure out why. That’s us. It all comes down to one specimen.” The woman held a picture of Clark towards the screen. “He’s not what you think. He’s not what he thinks, either.”

“By this time you’ll have heard of the first deaths.” Clark’s face was replaced by an x-ray of a hand, the skeleton riddled with lumps someone had inexplicably colored in with green. “It’s Mineral-3, the meteorites from the 1989 shower. The subjects it infects develop seemingly impossible powers and a psychosis that turns them on their fellow humans.” 

“Jor-El, the alien ghost of your friend Clark’s bio-dad (yes, ghosts are a thing, aliens are a thing, Clark is an alien, roll with it) he calls these meteorites kryptonite, and says they are radioactive pieces of the alien home planet, Krypton, which was destroyed by war. Jor-El told Clark that the radiation is the result of the weapons used in the war, that their effect on humans is coincidental. 

“This is a lie. Mineral-3 was designed to mutate humans. We know this because in the early 1500s, centuries before their planet exploded, kryptonians used Mineral-3 to mutate humans. They brought Mineral-3 to Earth, to what is now Smallville, using it on the members of the Kawatche tribe, some of whom’s descendants can still shape-shift into wolves. Oral tradition holds that other tribe members manifested other powers, but none of those were passed on, likely because those mutations resulted in death, the way contact with Mineral-3 so often does.” 

“Mineral-3 causes the aliens extreme harm, makes their blood boil, and was undoubtedly an effective weapon in the war that destroyed the planet. But that came later. Back in the 1500s, they took the mineral with them on a spaceship, travelling with it for many light years even though it caused them pain, and at the end of their trip they used it to mutate humans. That was not a coincidence. It was, however, a mistake, part of a misunderstanding that spanned generations.”

The story that followed was like Orson Welles had written a Greek tragedy. If Lex hadn’t already realized he was dreaming, this would do it. Still, he listened. 

Once upon a time there was a planet of ice, and the people there all spoke the same language. They didn’t look human (after all why would creatures from an ice planet have hands that evolved to climb trees?) They didn’t act human, either. Kryptonians might have always been more cooperative, like bees, or maybe they used gene therapy to weed out antisocial behavior until their species became something unnatural and new, but the end result was clear: unlike humans, the people of Krypton all spoke one language, Kryptonian. 

They came to Earth to rule. It wasn’t out of maliciousness or avarice. Kryptonians all spoke one language and were one nation and likely had been for generations before they developed interstellar travel and came to Earth. How could they imagine something like humans’ desire for self-governance, especially at first contact, three thousand years ago when humans were constantly dying from war and starvation and plague?

The Kryptonians came from the sky with abilities that seemed magic. The humans called them ‘gods’ and had a list of requests, the things the gods who ruled them needed to do. (Or did, or were said to have done: the aliens all spoke one language and had no concept of translation error.)

There was evidence of Kryptonians in ancient China. In China, they would have heard the story of three god-emperors who between them gave humans all the knowledge of society. They went home, copied all their people’s knowledge onto a crystal and split the crystal into three pieces as asked.

They brought the pieces back to Earth, to Egypt, mere hundreds of years and thousands of miles away, only to hear that the request had changed. Now the humans told of Osiris, that the one who wished to rule the planet should cut their body into 42 pieces and scatter them across the land, to be gathered and sewn back together, (unless their genitals got eaten by a fish meanwhile, in which case the aspiring ruler was sad out of luck.) Instead of cutting a body into 42 parts, they scattered the three pieces of crystal they’d already made. They hid these three pieces throughout the land (in China, Egypt and the Mayan empire) and waited. The humans did not reassemble them.

The Kryptonians didn’t leave any artifacts in Greece, but they must have heard at some point that gods were supposed to look just like humans only better, that they should be faster, stronger, all-seeing. (Zeus once lay with a woman named Semele and accidentally burned her to cinders, and Lex took a moment to wonder at his own subconscious, because as far as he knew he was happily encouraging the relationship between Clark and Lana and had no desire for Clark to set her on fire with eye-lasers if he became aroused.) 

The Kryptonians went home and made their entire species look human. They gave themselves all the nonsensical powers that the humans had asked for, (but tied them to a yellow sun because no one wants their neighbors to see and hear everything they do and eye-lasers are dangerous.) 

Greece was also where the report guessed the Kryptonians heard of hamartia and the gods’ poisoned gifts. Kryptonians couldn’t come up with anything to rival the Greek myths, so they made Mineral-3 as a cop-out. It read thoughts and rendered a change on anyone who wished hard enough, their greatest want mixed with their greatest fear. If the human didn’t have a big enough fear for the rock to read, it would substitute the greatest fear of any Kryptonian: turning on their family and becoming a menace to society.

As for the Prometheus story, a man dying each day when his liver is eaten by birds, resurrected only to be killed again: Mineral-3 temporarily shorted-out Kryptonian powers, letting their invulnerable skin be pierced, boiling their blood and rearranging it into something that could regrow a liver and resurrect a dead man day after day if the gods were feeling cruel. 

It took the Kryptonians a long time to make Mineral-3 and their new ridiculous bodies. During this millennium, the humans still didn’t reunite the stones. The aliens tried to hurry them along, creating witches and entrancers and treasure maps, but the humans still left the three pieces scattered far apart.

Eventually, they returned to give the Kawatche the poisoned powers that the Greeks had requested, and to show their great strength and eye-lasers. They mentioned the three pieces of crystal. The humans still didn’t reunite the stones, instead telling the Kryptonians about how a human man and a kryptonian man would be close as brothers and then turn on each other as the sky turned to fire. They even drew pictures on the walls of the cave the Kryptonians were staying in as visual aides.

At this point, the Kryptonians began to wonder if the humans might not want to be ruled by them. 

The Kryptonians completed the Kawatche’s request (Lex’s subconscious was scary) but never again asked a human about what gods should do. Instead, the House of El began sending their sons to Earth as a right of passage. They lived as humans for a week to see what wisdom they could get from a species so different from Kryptonians. 

It all went to hell in 1961. Clark’s father met Lana Lang’s great-aunt and learned about free will. He decided to bring it to his people. 

Red Kryptonite undid the modifications on Kryptonian minds, letting them make their own choices. Clark’s father Jor-El soon had cause to build a ‘phantom dimension for bad aliens’, the Kryptonian’s first prison. He fought against ‘General Zod’ in their first war. Twenty-eight years after Lana’s aunt helped the house of El discover free will, the planet Krypton was destroyed. 

Jor-El sent his son to Earth. Maybe this was desperation: Earth might be the only other planet with people who would care for a human-looking child. Maybe it was mercy: It gave the humans one last chance to live under Kryptonian rule. 

Maybe it was vengeance. Maybe Clark was meant as a cuckoo’s egg. Humans would have no way to comprehend his filial loyalty, just as the Kryptonians couldn’t have comprehended lies or myths or free will. He would learn the human way of life and one day his father’s ghost would call on him to replace that way with a better one.

If so, Jor-El had miscalculated. It wasn’t his fault. To a species that had conquered all illness, to whom war and crime were recent inventions and unwanted pregnancy unheard of, adoption would be a baffling concept. Earth was safe because Jor-El didn’t have Clark’s loyalty. Clark’s father was Johnathan Kent.

But there were ways around this, for a being with access to enough technology. And there were other Kryptonians who had escaped their planet’s destruction and would want to bring Earth to heel. There were rocks in the soil cursing the citizens of Smallville, and 2.3 tons more poised to drop on the town if someone a continent away bled on the wrong statue. 

At any moment, Clark might get his first erection and set Lana Lang on fire. 

* * *

I'm running and not quite sure where to go

* * *

_“Listen to the mustn’ts, child, Listen to the don’ts…”_ No.

 _“I believe that myth is more potent than history and dreams are more powerful than facts…”_ No.

 _“Be careful what you wish for…“_ Definitely not.

Somewhere, someone must have written a quote about thinking your best friend was a liar and finding out he was an alien, but Lex hadn’t heard it. 

He’d been sure it was just a dream at first, his brain trying to process the guilt of seeing Cassandra Carver die by coming up with a crackpot reason for all the other Smallville deaths. Then Dr. Vargas had told him about his elevated level of white blood cells, how odd mutations were so common in Smallville that doctors didn’t even test for leukemia anymore. 

He had spent the early evening driving. He went past Smallville Quarry and Crater Lake, the graveyard where Walt Arnold was buried, and Loeb Bridge where this all began. ( _He should find a way to pull Nixon off his search._ )

What he needed was corroboration. He’d looked up a contact number for someone in the Kawatche tribe, maybe to ask whether they knew anyone who could turn into a wolf. ( _No, think Lex, you’re an adult, no confrontations without weighing what you might win and lose._ ) If he was wrong, they might tell the Inquisitor that he was crazy. If he was right, they might still tell the Inquisitor he was crazy, then stop by some night with their very sharp teeth. ( _Dead Luthors tell no tales._ ) 

He needed something verifiable, new evidence that he could collect himself. A test, he had decided, that could support or disprove the theory. From there it had seemed obvious: what better way to collect evidence in secret than to experiment on himself? He’d swung by the mansion for supplies, and then he’d come to the field. 

The rough wooden post scratched his head as he leaned back. He’d saved Clark here. No matter whether the dream was real or not, that one thing was true. The tall, dense cornstalks that had seemed so menacing on his last two visits had turned yellow. Interesting to note that the wooden post was still missing its scarecrow. Maybe the farmer had taken it in for the season. Maybe there had never been a scarecrow and the farmer just left this cross up year after year for high school students, to test them. 

On the subject of tests, he took a deep breath into the alcohol detector he’d made for a long-ago science fair and jotted down the time and number on his pad. Then he took three long swigs of 115-proof scotch before setting the bottle back down. He traced a new line along around the bottle’s surface with a sharpie and labelled it '11:56pm.' 

“ _When the clock strikes midnight, all the evil things_ …” No.

“ _Tomorrow comes into us at midnight very clean_...” No.

“ _Once upon a midnight dreary_ …” No

“ _Let men in office substitute the midnight oil for the limelight._ ” Ha! That one might work. Bless you, Coolidge, you sanctimonious curmudgeon.

“Lex?” _And lo, what light…_

Clark’s face was pale in the moonlight, his cheekbones seeming even more carved than usual. Ever since their second meeting when Lex had realized Clark’s young age, he’d done his best to ignore the boy’s features, but this was not rhapsodizing, it was stating a relevant fact. Clark looked like a Greek statue, and there might be a reason for it. One thing Lex fervently agreed with the dream about: Clark looked just like a human, only better. His steps rustled as he passed through the withered stalks. Lex hadn’t heard Clark approach. 

Clark frowned as he came forward. “What are you doing out here?” Lex saluted Clark with his near-empty bottle, not trusting himself to speak. “Are you getting drunk?”

“Yes,” Lex was forced to admit, and Clark frowned more deeply. “Don’t worry. It’s for science.” He saluted Clark again, this time with his homemade alcohol detector, but the boy didn’t seem reassured. 

“If you say so. But why out here? Why not at the mansion, where someone can watch out for you?”

Someone watching him, how comforting. Well, it might be comforting to have Clark watching out for him, though apparently Clark could watch him from anywhere, which was less comforting. Lex chuckled. “No, I think I’ll stay here.”

“Lex,” the boy admonished before visibly swallowing his indignation. “Are you okay?”

There was only one answer to that. “Of course I am, Clark.” Really the whole thing was ridiculous. Johnathan Kent was always ready to Shun The Luthor, and Clark was here anyway. ( _Because Mr. Kent is a hypocrite who told his son to give people a chance._ ) No, Clark was a caring human being, not some alien, brainwashed, stepford-son, drone thing. Lex was being stupid, and in the morning when he figured everything out he would be grateful he hadn’t told anyone his crackpot idea. 

He dredged up a different reason to get drunk. “I was there when she died. Cassandra Carver. I brought her flowers, asked her to tell me my future, and she died.” ( _For me. For 12,000 people on ‘Dark Thursday.’ For nothing, maybe._ ) “I should send more flowers for the funeral. Did you figure out who’s going to die?”

“What?”

“She said someone close to you would die, right? Any luck figuring out who?” Maybe Clark would only ever admit to the supernatural in the case of this one woman. Maybe that was enough.

“Her, Lex," Clark revealed solemnly. "She saw her own death.”

“Oh." He frowned. "Sorry, I didn’t know you were close.”

“She was my friend. She told me...she thought I could help people.”

“I completely agree with her. But that means she was nice, not that she was your friend. You met her, what, twice? _I_ met her twice, brought her flowers even. That doesn’t mean we were friends.”

“I met her three times,” Clark corrected testily.

Ugh, Clark. Lex was too drunk to smooth over hurt feelings. “I’m sorry to be saying this. I’m sure your time together enriched you both,” Lex carefully pronounced. “But if we agree she had gifts, if she said someone close to you was slated to die, shouldn’t we try to prevent it? Unless it’s one of those ‘everyone close to you will die because everyone dies eventually’ charlatan things. You’re sure she was the real deal?”

“Yes, Lex, and she didn’t just say they’d die, she said someone close to me would die very...soon.” he trailed off pensively. “I was holding her in my arms at the time. She’d just fallen out of her chair.”

Well, you had to be close to someone to hold them. Lex did his best to never giggle, but sometimes the occasion called for it.

“Come on, Lex, I can drive you home.”

“No, wait, I have to find…” proof, one way or the other, of whether aliens had cursed the meteors. He couldn’t tell Clark that, though, what if he was wrong? What if he was right? “I have to stay until the scotch is gone,” he finished. That was true, too.

“You’re looking for something? Maybe I can help you find it.” He glanced around them with determination and made as if to stand up, but slumped back down almost immediately. “Or maybe you should look somewhere else. I don’t think there’s much to find in a cornfield.” 

“You’d be surprised.” You could find years and years worth of hazed freshmen in a cornfield. Meteors. Maybe even aliens and spaceships and their keys.

“You dropped something?”

Lex shook his head, then paused. That was an idea. “It fell from...high up...on the day of the shower. Probably got buried.” If it existed at all. 

“That’s what your device is for? To find it?” Lex gave Clark an unimpressed look. It might have a sort of cobbled-together aesthetic and a few exposed circuit boards, but how could any self-respecting alien mistake a breathalyzer for a metal detector? He was probably human, then.

“You flew in with your dad,” Clark remembered. “You were scared and young. Maybe you confused which field it fell to?”

“Huh.” That wasn’t a bad point. The dream had just said the key was left in the cornfield the ship fell to. It was Lex’s brain that had somehow decided there was only one cornfield in the world that mattered. “You’re right.”

“What does it look like?” 

“Silver octagon, three inch diameter. It’s a...family heirloom, you could say.”

“And how does your detector work?”

He pointed to the repurposed microphone. “Sensor.” he pointed to the long row of LEDs soldered to the circuit board. “Output. The more lights flash…” The more drunk you are. He stopped himself from finishing, though. ( _In any conversation, weigh the risks and rewards._ )

“Right, got it.” He took the detector and stood up, disappearing into the crackling dry stalks.

Lex smiled to himself. He had...glancing at his watch, he saw he had twenty-four minutes until the most recent quaff of scotch would definitely be absorbed into his bloodstream and he could test his blood alcohol again. How long would it be before Clark gave up, or realized that his ‘metal detector’ didn’t detect metal? 

“ _If I cease searching, then woe is me, I am lost._ ” No, just the opposite, Lex would only see Clark again when the boy gave up the search.

“ _I have noticed that the people who are late are often much jollier than the people who are waiting for them._ ” No, he’s trying to be helpful. It’s your own fault that you’re waiting for him.

“ _Ah, nothing is too late, till the tired heart shall cease to palpitate._ ” Perfect, a little Longfellow fortitude to brighten up the night. Not always true, but very comforting.

“Is this it?” Clark popped out of the corn stalks with barely a rustle, holding a silver octagonal disk in front of him. It was the disk from his dream. The disk was real, the aliens were real, ghosts were real and one was possessing a metal disk, poised to poison his son’s brain and use him to kill thousands, take over the Earth, maybe start a new ice age. Except the son was obliviously offering this possessed piece of metal to Lex instead, like a very tall hobbit trying to pawn off the One Ring.

Lex tentatively held out his hand for it, but Clark drew it back to his chest and eyed Lex earnestly. “Do you promise to let me take you home now? It really isn’t safe to sleep outside this time of year; the temperature can drop suddenly.”

“I promise.” Simple as that, the metal was transferred to Lex’s jacket pocket, along with the paper he’d been recording his measurements on and his sharpie. Clark pulled Lex to his feet and stared down at the liquor bottle disapprovingly, obviously wondering whether to take it or leave it. Which did the Kents hate more, littering or excessive drinking?

“You can pour it out,” Lex offered, and Clark leaned him back against the post and handed him the breathalyzer before doing just that. 

Holding onto Lex with one hand and the bottle with the other, Clark herded him to the passenger side of his own car. “Don’t worry. I don’t have my permit yet, of course, but I’ve taken the class and Dad has me drive around to deliver the produce. The police out here never ticket for underage driving.” Clark helped him into the seat and fussed with his seat belt. “I’ll leave the detector in the back. It’s really neat. Where did you get it?”

“I made it senior year.”

“Wow! I don’t know of anyone at Smallville High who could make that.” Clark got in on the other side and began to drive. “It was really useful, lead me right to your...thing.”

“Thank you, Clark.” He couldn’t do this. He wasn’t sober enough to listen to lies of this magnitude with a straight face. “I think I’m going to sleep a little. Wake me up when we get to the mansion.”

“Alright. Just don’t do this again, okay?”

“No need.” He closed his eyes and began to plan.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title and page breaks are from [Hanging by a Moment](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQ_QMBnblXg) by Lifehouse, the number one single of 2001.


	3. Turn it Inside Out so I Can See

_“Dear Hephaestion,”_ Lex wrote, and then stared down at the leaf of printer paper. What was there to say? Hephaestion had been Alexander’s most competent general, closest advisor, truest friend. He’d been the sort of man a farmboy might have grown to become, if the boy was steadfast and daring enough to stand beside someone with an Alexander’s destiny. “ _I wanted,”_ he paused again, “ _us,”_ he added hesitantly, but couldn’t finish the sentence. There was so much space left on the page for a story that would never be written. 

He dropped down a few inches and started a new line, feeling utterly ridiculous. _“I’m sorry,”_ he wrote to a Clark Kent who had never existed, and to the Lex who would have been his friend. “ _I’ll miss you.”_

Scoffing at his own mawkishness he flipped over the page. 

_“Dear Alexander,_

_How wed are you to the whole ‘conquering’ thing? Have you considered how many soldiers and civilians will die in the war? Is there a way to conquer humans without a show of force? Aristotle raised you more than Phillip ever did. I wish I knew what he thought of your destiny. Does he think you’re good enough to rule the world? Or does he think you’re too good to ever stoop to ruling the world? What about your mother? ~~What about your other mother?”~~ _

Better, but he was forced to stop again and scribble out the last sentence, because Alexander only ever had one mother. Clark may be destined to rule the world, sired by one man yet raised by another, but the parallels only went so far. Also, the writing so far was somewhere between eccentric and cryptic rather than ‘so shameful that the writer could rip it out of someone’s hands without drawing dangerous questions.’ He switched to a new sheet of paper.

 _“Queen Olympias had always said that the night before Prince Alexander’s conception, she had dreamed of a bolt from the heavens entering her womb, and that this was the reason her son seemed to shine with divine light. It was only after King Phillip’s death that she revealed Alexander’s true heritage: he was son to the northern gods. Will Alexander be able to take his place as a just king of Macedonia when strange immortal instincts are woven into his blood? Or will his true father’s spirit drive him to conquer all of the mortal realm?”_ That was the question, wasn’t it? It was cathartic, seeing his fears in black and white like this. Though Clark’s true nature was only one problem. 

_“As Alexander’s divine powers grow, so does the mysterious threat that arrived with him.”_ And Lex was already working to stop it. _“At the same time, the disaster that caused the northern gods to send one of their own so far south will soon impact Macedonia.”_ That one rivaled the sword of Damoclese: 2.3 tones of cursed meteors, two aliens, a robot, and a ghost, all held back by a single drop of human blood. _“And how will the gods of Greece react when a fosterling lays claim to the mortals under their sway?”_ A family in Russia named Mxyzptlk, a necklace from the Italian Renaissance, even Lana Lang if her witch powers came online: they could make anyone do anything, including Clark. Should he destroy them before they had a chance to control Clark? Should he keep them in reserve in case Clark needed someone to stop him? 

_“Hephaestion’s father sent him to Macedonia to ‘learn to become a man,’ and an accident soon landed him in Alexander’s path. A chance meeting with an oracle opens Hephaestion’s eyes to the dangers of this new land. Can he work with Alexander to stop a growing hidden threat and two sets of gods? How will he earn the trust of Aristotle, Alexander’s wise mentor who hates Hephaestion for the actions of his father? Can he protect his homeland of Byzantium, first in the path of Alexander’s imminent conquest?_

_Will he lose his life or his heart?”_

“Faxes from County Records for you Mr. Luthor?” Mrs. Mathers announced hesitantly from the doorway, hands too full to knock.

“Thanks, over there is fine,” Lex gestured to the spot he’d cleared on his desk, eyeing the stack of paper. “Put the top half on the side table,” he decided.

“Right, I’ll bring the rest when they’re done printing,” she announced and hurried off. 

Lex’s first step was to secure the Mineral-3. The report had very clearly listed the reasons: humans influenced by the rocks were a danger to themselves and others. It was one of the few things that could hurt Clark’s species once they found Earth. It was one of the few things that had a chance against alien technology (such as the haunted key that Lex was now the unlucky owner of). It hurt Clark, and getting it all sealed away in a bunker somewhere could be a good way to start gaining the Kents’ trust and opening the doorway to collaboration. It hurt Clark, and knowing that Clark couldn’t be tortured by a cheerleader’s necklace mattered to Lex, for more reasons than saved lives or saved planets. Maybe the report was right and Clark would never be his friend, could never be capable of it. _Lex_ was still _Clark’s_ friend.

So, securing the Mineral-3 was clearly the goal. When it came to execution, Lex ran into something he was calling ‘The Kelvin Problem,’ named after a boy whose corpse had rested safely in his frozen pond for a week, up until he’d discovered it and tried to do something about it. ( _He might have called it ‘Dad Issues’, but he already had so many of those._ ) He needed to act without his dad’s minions seeing, or maybe just without his dad realizing what they saw. 

This would have been so much easier if he had been the Lex Luthor that had commissioned the report, CEO of LutherCorp in a happy time when Lionel must have been dead or retired. All Lex had in 2001 was a mansion that was obviously bugged, whatever was going on between him and Clark ( _which had already netted him a haunted space key, so not nothing_ ), the trust fund his mom left him, and his new job in management with PAs who would bring him county records, no questions asked.

There were a lot more papers than he’d been expecting, lots of property sales since the year his dad bought the plant. Though considering the shower was the same year, maybe it wasn’t so surprising.

He flipped through the old National Geographic he had gotten from the library, opening to the 1990 article on rebuilding after the shower. Along with the ruined homes in sepia and color photos of Main Street covered in scaffolding mid-construction, the church groups in matching T-shirts posing in front of rebuilt houses and the quips about 'barn raising', there were four glossy aerial photos taken the day after impact. Lex ran his finger along the river until he found Loeb Bridge, then traced the hair-thin road out to the white dot of the Creamed Corn Factory. Deep brown tracks gouged the green fields to the right of the factory and the lower left, which transferred to the old Lowell County property map would be south and northeast… he unfurled an old property map and relocated the impact sites: Plot 160 had been owned by someone named DF Allison, and 320 by WM Borth. Next he searched through the stacks, luckily in order. Looks like Allison’s descendants had sold plot 160 to the factory in 1991. Plot 320… also sold to the factory, in ‘90.

Lex nodded to himself. That had been surprisingly easy. He hadn’t needed to make an excuse about plant expansion to acquire the land, and now he could immediately find some excuse to pull up the meteorite. ( _Maybe taking impurities from gravel?_ )

Was there any other property he could start clearing immediately? Jonathan had spurned Lex’s attempt to bail his farm out of debt, but he briefly imagined asking the Kents permission to let him dig meteors out of their back forty. He huffed a laugh. One would hope decent parents would have gotten rid of the stuff already, assuming any fell that close to them. 

Lex looked over the aerial photos again and eventually decided that nothing noticeable had fallen on the Kent’s property, or over that of the Potter’s next door. 

What other impact sites could he buy or at least access without causing dangerous questions? He absently traced the path through blank fields on the aerial photos that would one day be a mile-long driveway to the spot where the mansion would be, frowning as he realized that it was not empty green but instead had four brown gashes. 

Lex felt his pulse speed up as he tapped the glossy page. Four sizable meteors had impacted the property, the largest nearly spanning what would become the foundations of the mansion itself. What were the odds of his staff being infected? Was there a way to check, other than waiting for the bodies to start dropping? What if Lex went crazy himself? Was he safe from future affects since he’d already been mutated once? What about Clark?

Lex reached for his phone to ask the groundskeeper to have his people dig up any green rocks around the house. Except no, that would just lead to murderous magical gardeners ( _not magic, science, impossible cursed science_ ) unless he had lead-lined protective gear made for them first. Would gloves be enough? It probably wouldn’t hurt to have a whole suit, maybe a full-on hazmat suit to prevent inhalation...was inhalation a thing to worry about? Theoretically, the Mineral-3 picked up on the greatest hopes and fears of the people it altered, so maybe if the hazmat suit’s hood was lead-lined that would block the brain-waves? Maybe that was all the clean-up crew would need. ( _If you wear tinfoil hats, you’re crazy. What does it say about you if you make everyone else wear them instead?_ ) It would definitely be conspicuous, which was just begging for the Kelvin Problem to rear up, but there wasn’t a way to make lead hats inconspicuous short of hiring a Renaissance troop to do the dig in their helmets. Were firefighter helmets ever lead-lined? 

Lex’s thoughts raced, tumbling over each other, and blaring behind it all was the deadline: he needed to figure this out before Wednesday, when Clark came to deliver the produce. Except… Lex frowned and rechecked his maps. Clark delivered the produce every Wednesday, and he never acted like he was standing on Mineral-3. If his blood was literally boiling in his veins, surely the boy wouldn’t stick around to play pool. Where had the meteorites gone?

Lex intercommed his PA. “Mrs. Mathers, can you have Mr. Sullivan check in with me?”

Gabe Sullivan came in with a worried frown. “Looks like McClaine was right. Paint that old, no way it’s not full of lead. I wonder why it’s in our supply closet, though. This factory wasn’t built until the 90’s, long after the EPA crackdown.” He glanced around the office, peering at the painted walls suspiciously before shaking his head. “Mr. Luthor Senior might be willing to cut corners to save a dollar or two, but not like this. The added stress of extreme pressures and temperatures here at the plant breaks paint down faster. Paint chips in the fertilizer, contaminating the food it grows, sending tainted produce to groceries around the country… a lawsuit like that would be worth more than the whole factory, let alone the cost of safe paint. If he was looking to lower building costs, he would’ve found some less risky corners to cut.” 

Lex managed to keep his face stoic, but realized with a start that his thumb had been tapping on the glossy magazine spread at the mansion’s future location, trying to rub off those four brown lines of torn earth. He stood up and crossed his arms nonchalantly. “Maybe the money troubles hit after construction,” he found himself hoping. “Someone could have bought the paint for touch-ups. It could even have been someone from the custodial staff, getting cheap paint second-hand without realizing it was toxic.”

Mr. Sullivan winced sympathetically. The unexpected cost of lead abatement in a building this size, with the factory already financially fragile from Lex’s decision not to fire the employees his father had told him to last month, could lead to some unavoidable layoffs. ( _If only that were Lex’s biggest worry._ ) Gabe reluctantly shook his head. “That’s a lot of paint for touch ups.”

Lex started pacing. “Who would have bought it?”

“I’ll have to ask around; that was before my time.” Lex opened his mouth to ask, and Mr. Sullivan beat him to it. “I only got promoted to this job last year,” he revealed, glancing at Lex’s desk to avoid eye contact. 

Practically demoted after a year to make way for the prodigal Luthor. Ouch. “From what I can tell, you’ve done an amazing job. I’m glad to have you backing me up. I know how unusual it must be for a capable manager such as yourself, suddenly answering to someone shoehorned into the corporate hierarchy through blatant nepotism, and that’s before you take into account the myriad stories of my misspent youth. Still, you’ve never made me feel less than welcome, and I appreciate that. I hope your family’s settling in more successfully than I am.”

Mr. Sullivan smiled tentatively. “It’s just me and my daughter. She’s a freshman. It was hard on her last year, moving away from her friends, and on top of that she and her mom got stuck in the shower here when she was little, so there were some bad memories. But she’s found a place for herself now and has two good friends. She’s even editor of the school newspaper. I never heard of putting a freshman in charge of the whole paper, but I guess there’s something to be said for small towns.”

“What was your family doing in Smallville back in 1989?” ( _And has your daughter developed any superpowers lately or psychotic tendencies?_ ) Judging by Mr. Sullivan’s expression, the question had come out a little harshly. “I thought you were born and bred in Metropolis?”

“It’s a long story.”

There was an awkward pause, Lex too nervous to properly focus on social niceties.

“This is your first job in management, right?” Mr. Sullivan broke the silence.

“First job at all, as we both know.”

“It’s a good place to start. It’s not like a restaurant or fashion line where you have to watch brand; farmers always buy from us as long as it’s cheap and it works. You seem to have a gift for negotiation, which is handy with the suppliers. And all the rest of it: employee training and retention, the equipment, the facility, even with this lead thing, it’s all top notch. And if you have any questions, you know where to find me.”

“You’ve really whipped this place into shape.”

“No, I inherited that. I tightened up the production line and handled a few ‘accounting discrepancies’ we’ll call them, but I doubt I would have been hired if the previous supervisor hadn’t been up to something he shouldn’t have.”

“Like what?”

“Station C. They used to staff it 24/7. It looked fine on paper, especially from an HR standpoint. It let employees do overtime and build up a surplus of gravel, the part of production guaranteed not to spoil. Then having the surplus let employees take time off if they need to without a drop in production.” Mr. Sullivan took a moment to look at Lex, grinning at his confusion. That seemed like a nice idea for extra flexibility, especially in a town where workers were so likely to need a week or two of bereavement leave. “Having the lights and heat on, not to mention manning the security desk, for times when the rest of the building is empty can get expensive,” the man noted. “Also,” he revealed, “every worker from Station C transferred out before I was hired; makes me think some cronyism might have inspired the whole situation in addition to poor planning.”

“That seems like a lot of drama over raised utility bills.” Sullivan nodded and looked expectant. Lex could have racked his brains for whatever the man wanted him to realize, but today he didn’t have the patience. “Alright, what am I missing?” he asked.

“The surplus! There were piles of gravel fifty-feet high, stacked out past the coolant tank for over an acre. It might have been safe from decomposition, but once weeds grew in it the whole thing would need to be reprocessed anyway. It took a few bulldozers to level it out and we’ll probably be scooping it up for reprocessing for the next few decades.”

The back of Lex’s neck began to tingle. “What did they do with the impurities?” He wouldn’t have thought to ask, except he’d just been plotting this same scheme: buy up land for the plant, take out the Mineral-3 and say it was the normal excess of one chemical or another that needed to be removed before the gravel was mixed with the manure.

“Huh. Yeah, I didn’t see any bioremediation fields, though the gravel might have covered them. I can do some digging. Just our luck if they didn’t dispose of something properly and the EPA finds the dump site before we do.” 

“Maybe we should talk to the last manager?”

“No, he died. Suicide.”

And the Kelvin Effect struck again. At least this time the person died before Lex started investigating; it made him feel less responsible somehow. “Don’t ask around,” he told Sullivan. “Not yet, at least. We don’t want to set off an EPA investigation until we know what they’ll find. In any case, we should get those cans of lead paint off the premises before the EPA gets word of it. Have someone take them to my car, I have room in the mansion.” ( _And something to keep away from a pair of prying, exceptional eyes._ )

After Mr. Sullivan left, Lex closed the old magazine he’d been working from and picked up the paper beneath. “ _Will he lose his life or his heart?”_ The safest thing would be to throw the paper away, or better yet burn it. Instead he wrote a title above the synopsis: “Νικητής Ἄγγελος," greek for ‘Messenger of Victory’ or, translated more loosely, ‘Warrior Angel.’

He didn’t wait for Mrs. Mathers to drop off the rest of the records. Sure, he could have traced just how many of the brown meteor scars were now on Luthorcorp property, but was it really worth the time to meticulously measure exactly how screwed everyone was? He lay a tarp across the back seat of his car and loaded in as many paint cans as he could and drove away, back to the mansion. Except that instead of the mansion, somehow his car took him to the quarry. He thought of the piles of gravel behind the plant, left to grow grass, impurities hidden somewhere behind lead paint, extracted by people who had disappeared. ( _Witness the Kelvin Principle at work: Dad always wins._ )

What should he do? Why did the scientists choose to tell him now, before he inherited LuthorCorp, when all his dad’s minions and all the town’s citizens were watching him and waiting for him to fail? He managed to turn his back to the quarry, and got in his car again.

In Warrior Angel issue 245, a lab explosion sent Stephen Swift back in time to 1936 and he killed Hitler. It was later revealed that Hitler’s death had not prevented the second world war, but only delayed it, causing the eventual conflict to involve more nuclear detonations, transforming the present into a post-apocalyptic dystopia. Stephen managed to go back and correct his reckless act, learning a valuable lesson to never again meddle with the past. Even at sixteen years old, Lex had called bullshit. People were sentenced to die every day, and there were many arguments against the death penalty but none of them were ever ‘But what if this prolific murderer is somehow the only thing standing between us and a radioactive hellscape?’ No war in the history of the world was ever waged because the countries involved were worried the eventual fighting would be worse if they didn’t hurry up and get it out of their system already. Ray Bradbury was the first to write about how the effects of one dead butterfly might compound over millions of years, but he didn’t then spend the rest of his life campaigning for butterfly welfare. Sometimes science fiction had the notion that whatever timeline the heroes were from was the “right” one and that any changes would be for the worse, but that would mean that every action in the universe was the best possible action, and Lex’s heart rebelled at the implications.

So Lex had no excuse for weaving his way on county roads through farmland, scared to go back to the mansion, terrified of trying to save twelve thousand lives.

What if he arranged treatment for the people affected by the meteors, only to have them band together into some unstoppable legion?

What if he found the power stones but bled on one and brought down the xenocidal aliens?

What if he rounded up all the Mineral-3 on Earth and dumped it in the ocean only to have whales and squid start making wishes and wreaking havoc?

What if he rounded up the meteors and his father stole them? What if he tracked down the people affected by the meteors and got them into a special hospital, only for his father to grab them up and recruit them to take over the world? What if he contacted a few museums and universities to try to secure those power stones, only for his father to find out and track them down first, and use them to take over the world? What if Lex tried to get help from the witches or whatever that family from Russia was, and his father bribed them to help him take over the world? What if he made the wrong move, and his father somehow realized that if he arranged Jonathan’s death, seduced Martha, and called Clark ‘son’ often enough the filial piety might transfer so he could control Clark and take over the world?

Sure, Lex had used Clark’s trust to get the key before Jor-El could corrupt Clark, wipe any minds, or kill anyone the way he had in the other timeline. This hadn’t been by his plan, though, it had been luck and Clark’s own ignorance working for the good of Earth. It wasn’t a sign that he was worthy enough to handle this task.

The word “meteor” caught Lex’s eye from the side of the road, slowing the car before he could properly process the sign. It was Kinkos-style work, clip-art of a neon green rock in the center with the words “Meteor Rocks” in an arch above it. The text beneath read “Catch a falling star and put it in your pocket for $5 each” in Comic Sans. Someone had left a money box, padlocked shut, locked to a nearby tree with a bike chain. Below the sign, an ancient plastic milk crate filled to the brim with meteor rocks had no security at all. How many people could that infect? How many people would those infected kill? He’d visited the ATM recently, and only bought coffee from the Beanery since, so he emptied his wallet to put $196 into the money box. He wasn’t the best choice to save the world, but sometimes being a guy with a full wallet was enough.

Lex gingerly lifted the milk crate, holding it as far away from himself as possible, hastily setting it on the fallen autumn leaves beside his car. He spent a long moment looking between the crate of rocks on the ground and the cans of paint in his back seat. If he’d thought to keep a flathead screwdriver in the car, he could have pried open the cans and neutralized at least a few of the rocks right now. Instead he had to drive home, wondering if a car crash would leave him with the ability to breath fire and a taste for human flesh or some other absurd combination. 

With great reluctance, he set the crate in the passenger side footwell. “I know what you did to me,” he told the rocks, feeling ridiculous. “But before you get any more bright ideas, just know that losing my hair made me realize that looking like a freak isn’t half as bad as being boring. My new biggest fear is to become a completely average human, so if we get in a wreck and you decide to change me again, keep that in mind.” He stayed below the speed limit as he drove back to the mansion. 

* * *

_Tell me why you're here and who you are._   
  


* * *

When Martha and Johnathan had agreed to take in an alien, they knew the decision would come with some challenges. They’d braced themselves for it, even before their son started lifting coffee tables one-handed. The one thing they hadn’t been ready for was how remarkably easy raising an alien would be (apart from the shape shifters and bug boys, which were really a problem with _everyone else’s_ kids when you thought about it. She’d hate to have been their parents, and not just because most of their parents were dead).

She could pat herself on the back for raising Clark to know she’d always have an open ear and a shoulder to cry on. She could be smug about picking an honest husband and a good son. But when it came right down to it, Clark just lacked the human knack for lying and she and Johnathan reaped the benefits daily. A kid with super speed and x-ray vision should be much better at sneaking than Clark was, but it never seemed to occur to him to try. Her son now sat at the table halfheartedly untangling the bits of wire in the tool box, even though someone with his speed and stamina could surely have found somewhere private to brood. A year ago, Martha would have thought this was a cry for help, Clark’s subtle way of letting his parents know he was upset without starting the conversation himself. Now that she’d seen Clark try to lie to the neighbors, she wished she’d insisted he practice fibbing a little more growing up. Turns out Clark didn’t do subtle. Of all the options for a strange alien weakness, this one probably would turn out being more dangerous than the meteors.

Still, she wasn’t above taking advantage. “Clark, honey, is everything alright? You look a little down.” Sure enough, her son jerked his head up, eyes filled with awe at her ‘motherly intuition.’ She gave what she hoped was an inscrutable smile. Someday she’d tell him that his whole body gave away his moods, but for today she needed the help.

“Yeah, I’m fine, Mom.”

Martha raised a single eyebrow reprovingly.

“I’m worried about Lex,” he immediately caved. “I think the way everyone in town closes ranks and excludes him is getting to him. Did you read about the scarecrow? That level of bullying would get to me. I mean, I always think of him as above-it-all since he graduated college and has a job, but maybe the pressure we’re all putting on him is getting to be too much.”

“I’m sure he’s grateful that he has someone as warm-hearted as you to worry about him,” she complimented, and he ducked his head and smiled before turning his earnest eyes back on her. “Did he give you any particular reason to worry?” Clark’s eyes very obviously dropped away again. “Clark?”

“Last night,” he admitted, “Lex was out drinking.”

“At the bar?” The Wild Coyote didn’t really seem like Lex’s speed.

“Worse, in a cornfield.”

That seemed even less in character. Still, first things first. “He didn’t drive home, did he?”

“No, I took him back,” her son assured her.

She nodded. “What was he thinking, being out there like that?”

“He was looking for a family heirloom he lost on the day of the meteors.”

Martha had an immediate image of Lex as a little boy, pink and trembling and vulnerable like a snail pulled from his shell. Of course he’d lost something that day, poor boy. Johnathan, who must have come in to grab the toolbox, heard Clark’s response and shifted uncomfortably. He’d seen the boy’s suffering that day, too, but everything that came after had put up a wall around his heart, made him write the moment off as a lie, a play at vulnerability designed to sucker them in and expose their own weakness to Lionel by asking for help adopting Clark. Johnathan was the man she loved, but he could be horribly straight-forward. Just because Lionel had used his love and fear and his son’s pain against them didn’t mean it hadn’t been real. “Did he find it?” she asked before her husband could say anything cruel. 

Johnathan snagged the box and strode back outside. Clark smiled gratefully. “Yeah, he did. Well, I helped. He probably would have found it, he had a metal detector and everything, except he was looking in the wrong field. He was in Riley’s back forty, but the disk he was looking for, this metal octagon, was in Miller’s field instead. He said he dropped it when he was still in the helicopter; I guess everything looks the same from that high up.”

Martha ran to the door. “Johnathan!” she called out, flinging it open and searching for his form, starting when she saw him barely two feet away.

“What’s wrong, Martha?”

Soon enough, they were all in the cellar in front of the ship.

“Martha, what’s this all about?”

“If you’d stayed to listen to your son, you’d know” she bit off before taking a deep breath. “Clark just gave Lex something from Miller’s field." Clark just frowned in bewilderment. “And if we’d talked to our son about it, he would have known that Miller’s field is where this crashed to Earth.” She pointed to an octagonal indent on the metal band running the ship’s circumference. “You said it was a disk, an octagon, like that?”

Clark looked worried, but immediately protested, “He described the thing before I found it, and it was buried deep enough that I’m sure it was there since the meteors. He must’ve been ten or something, right? How would he even know about something that came from outer space and was immediately buried when he was ten?”

Johnathan seemed to be letting the logic sway him, but Martha would have none of it. Everyone else in this town got to believe in logic, got to ignore things that didn’t make sense. This family had a responsibility to deal with reality. “Can you think of another explanation?” she offered.

“Coincidence?” Clark did not look hopeful so much as mulish.

“Lex just happened to have a completely-unrelated small octagonal disk with him that day and dropped it in the exact same field?" Clark said nothing. "If that’s your theory, let’s test it. He’ll still be at work now, you said he worked long hours and it’s not even dark out yet. Run over to the mansion and use your x-ray again to find it. Bring it over here, and we’ll see if it matches the indent on the ship.” Clark looked appalled. “If it doesn’t match, you can run back over and put it back, no harm done. We’ll never speak of it again. Johnathan will be nice to Lex the next time they meet. In fact, Johnathan will invite Lex over for dinner the next time they meet, and ask what his favorite food is so I can cook it up as a secret apology.”

“Mom.”

Martha knew she was being cruel, but they couldn’t get the thing back without him. “If you trust your friend, you need to give him the chance to prove us wrong.” Clark opened and closed his mouth a few times, but the only reply was a gust of wind as he disappeared.

“When we’re right?” Johnathan asked.

They might want to put it back anyway. Which would prove more dangerous: one bolt from an alien ship or whatever information Lex would glean from its disappearance? Did he know it was from a spaceship? Did he know Clark’s secret? If he did, what would he do? Whatever the case, they had better to stick close to home the next few weeks. “Did you make all the reservations for Metropolis yet?”

He nodded regretfully. “I’m sure their cancellation policies are fair this far out, and I’d never say no to your cooking.” She was a little disappointed at the thought of cooking her own anniversary dinner. He noticed. “Or maybe I could cook dinner? Nothing too ambitious, but I could manage scrambled eggs and toast.

“And when you go to check on the barn door ‘real quick’ and come back to a pile of ash on the stove?” It had been known to happen one or two birthday mornings.

“That’s the ingenious part: it’ll be late enough to order pizza.” Johnathan sat on the step beside her. “Pizza, burned eggs, we’re strong enough to handle whatever life throws at us.” 

“Even celebrating our anniversary in the same house as a son who just developed the ability to see through walls?”

“Even that. Though, now that I think about it, didn’t they open a motel out by the edge of town? I think Mrs. MacGowan wrote a letter to the editor about how teens these days were bound to use it for immoral purposes not allowed under their parents’ roofs.”

“Aren’t we a little old for teen rebellion?”

“Have to get around to it at some point.”

“Speak for yourself, mister. I rebelled plenty by marrying you.” She leaned in for a kiss. They sat together on the step, watching the light fade from the open doorway above them, neither saying how long it had been. 

When Clark came back empty handed, she thought for a moment that he had decided to disobey. But Clark hadn’t found it. Instead he’d found a milk crate full of meteor rocks in a toolshed, surrounded by cans of lead paint. 

* * *

_I sense it now, the water's getting deep._

* * *

It wasn’t his usual scene. Most of the places Lex inhabited straddled the line between conspicuous wealth and good taste. Even the clubs he’d patronized back in the day had had a sort of pretentious edginess in the placement of each strobe light. The Metropolis Brew and View had a disco ball out in the lobby and a cardboard cutout of the three stooges. Here in the theater dining section, old posters for science fiction B-movies were actually shellacked into the walls and a kitschy ceramic statue of Kermit was tucked away the corner across from a suit of robotic armor. This early on a Tuesday, the place was mostly empty and the clientele were more likely to decide he was wearing a costume than to tell the tabloids they’d seen him. A silent film played on the screen, a somnambulist telling a man he would die tomorrow.

It wasn’t his usual company, either. He’d decided to get rid of his last PI, not by firing him but instead by filling his hours with a ‘new and pressing case.’ Lex had spent nearly an hour deciding on the perfect excuse for why he might suddenly be looking for dirt on old classmates, but disappointingly Nixon hadn’t asked for any reason. You threaten to have a man erased from civilization one time and he decides you’re irrationally vengeful. ( _He’d keep that in mind for the next time he needed to hide his motives._ )

Nixon had been a loose cannon, lacking the weight of convictions. Lex normally went to that sort of man for his shadier dealings, since there was more they were willing to do. Those kinds of people could also be hard to keep on target, though. This was a delicate situation, requiring someone more dependable.

“Alright, I’m here. Your five minutes start now, and if you ever contact Sister Mary Ellen again I’ll tell the _Inquisitor_ that you’re stalking her.” Randall Brady was only a few years older than Lex, but seemed considerably more solid. ‘Stalwart’ was the description Brady’s therapist had used, though given how easily Lex had bribed her for her patient notes, he was surprised she’d chosen a word with such a connotation.

“You’ve known the Sister for a long time, haven’t you? Ever since you and your brother were in Holy Cross’s Care Club. It’s a good story: kid from the wrong side of the tracks attends afterschool program, stays off the streets and discovers a deep appreciation of Johnathan Swift, eventually earning a scholarship to Met U and a degree in literature. They still tell that story to potential donors.” 

“So? Rich people like to hear about how their money can help people; it lets them feel better about how they earned it.” Brady paused and gave Lex a contemptuous once-over. “Well, the ones with souls do at least.”

Lex smirked. “They tend to leave out the part about the costs that the scholarship didn’t cover, the textbooks, the living expenses, and exactly how your brother found the money to pay for it all. Rich donors don’t want to hear about why he never made it to your graduation.” Lex had been keeping an ear out, though. It had been a strange time for him, after Club Zero, and he’d wanted a fixer of his own, someone better than Phalen. He’d given up eventually; the candidates he’d really wanted were the ones least likely to work for him. But the stakes were different now.

This time the scornful gaze found Lex’s slice of pizza and Lex had to tamp down on the urge to protest that walnuts and artichoke were actually standard toppings here. “If you know about that, why did you arrange this meeting? What could I possibly want from the son of Lionel Luthor?” 

“Payback. My father took something you care about, and you can take something from him. He mostly just cares about money and power, which can be hard to take away from him; he always turns it around somehow and ends up with even more. Every now and then, though, some special project or another will worm its way into his withered heart. Right now it’s Smallville. You heard about the meteor shower back in 1989? With a typical meteor fall, scientists would rush over immediately and start documenting. The meteorite’s type, the depth of impact, for the achondrous ones they even analyze the chemical composition to figure out which exact asteroid it broke off of.”

“God damn it, Luthor, I’m a private investigator not an astronomer,” Brady cut in dryly.

Lex grimaced internally, but kept his face impassive. “Think less Star Trek, more X-Files. My point is that no one’s publishing anything. Do you understand how unusual that is? In the summer of last year, construction workers in Tennessee found some mammal fossils from an ancient watering hole. They immediately called in a scientist to investigate. The governor ended up rerouting the highway they’d been working on, and this summer, the paleontology department of the local college set up internships to excavate the site. Within one year. You were at Met U longer than I was; how many times have professors taken their classes to visit the Smallville impact site in the past decade? The meteors are unlike anything on record, but in all the time since they fell no one’s even bothered to pick them up.

“Except for the workers at the LuthorCorp plant. For years, the plant brought in rock with meteors in it. The rock got processed into fertilizer, and the meteors disappeared. I know what my father’s doing, that he’s bribed or intimidated the right people so he can discover the meteors’ secrets without any oversight. I just need proof.”

“You want me to dig up dirt so the two of you can blackmail each other in some private geological spat, while people around you undoubtedly die in the crossfire? Not interested.” Brady stood up to go, almost bumping into the waiter as he arrived with their beer.

“How about I sweeten the pot?” Lex asked. 

“I’m not interested in your money, either.” Brady spat out.

The waiter interjected at this point, “Good for you, but if you’re splitting the check, just to let you know, the beer is $2.50.” 

Lex chuckled “That much? Clearly I’m trying to corrupt you with these sybarite temptations.” Brady scowled, but he didn’t leave when the waiter did. “I’m sure you’ll find some good use to put my money to, but that’s not what I meant. Let me give you what you really want.”

“And what’s that?”

“A chance to save innocent people from my father.” 

The PI sat back down.

“Jenna Barnum died two weeks ago. She was seventeen.”

“You think your father killed her?”

“The police caught the killer: Sean Kelvin, also seventeen. Typical jock by all accounts, a bit too forward and none too bright, but not the sort to kill his girlfriend. He’s missing.” Lex didn’t mention the frozen corpses or his broken generator, he needed to keep the story simple at first if he wanted Brady to bite.

“You want me to find him? What, don’t you trust the police?”

“Not the ones in Smallville. Three weeks ago, Tina Greer, fifteen, killed her mother, Rose, after impersonating me to rob a bank.”

“A fifteen-year-old girl tried to impersonate you? Did she at least shave her head?”

Lex sighed. “You have no idea what a relief it is to hear someone ask that question. I knew you were the right person for the job.” He didn’t mention the eyewitnesses Tina had fooled, there would be time enough later for Randall Brady to discover the nightmare that was Smallville. “Before that week Tina was a decent student, if a bit introverted, with no history of kleptomania or murder. She was taken into custody, but I haven’t been able to find out where.”

“So you’re saying your father kidnapped both teens, framed them for crimes so no one would go looking for them. You could have led with that instead of the conspiracy to commit geology.”

He could leave it for now, but Brady might not find the right leads if he thought this was ordinary human trafficking. “You’ll have to form your own conclusions, of course. My theory is that Kelvin and Greer committed the crimes they were accused of, under the influence of an unpublished chemical, something recently discovered and unique to Smallville.”

“You think the murders are connected to the meteors?”

“Yes, and not just them. Five weeks ago Gabrielle Arkin was found dead in her home, body disfigured, next to a pile of human skin. Her son Greg, fifteen, is still missing. Again, no history of violence or mental illness.”

Brady cursed under his breath and then put on a blase face. “At least it’s not every week, then.”

Lex smiled. “No, the week between Arkin and Greer no one disappeared. Walt Arnold, the high school football coach, died in the locker room shower. Someone set him on fire. The police ruled it an accident due to faulty plumbing.”

“Okay, I’m leaving, you’re obviously making this up. Not even a Luthor could sweep that much dirt under a rug the size of Smallville.”

“I brought the town paper. You can check the obituaries yourself, and the missing persons.”

“But the people in town don’t? Can they not read?”

Lex shrugged helplessly, he’d wondered that himself. “Luthorcorp does offer competitive salaries, and most of the people who aren’t employed by us are very attached to their farms.” Take the Kents for example: any sane parents would take their alien child out of the meteor-studded abattoir that was Smallville, but heaven forbid Johnathan Kent should abandon the land that his ancestors claimed with the Homestead Act.

“Did it happen last week?” Brady asked, flipping through the newspapers. Lex helpfully pointed him to the right page: _Unknown Teen Attacks Barista, Charged with Murder of Local Accountant._

“The mystery teen is also a suspected to have killed a senior citizen after he disappeared from police custody. As he was never identified and hasn’t been seen since, we don’t know whether he had a history of violence, but I doubt it.”

“Does the pattern go back?”

“I haven’t had a chance to look into it. I only moved to Smallville six weeks ago. No one was murdered that first week, though three men fell into comas over the course of three days, all age 29. I can tell you that I’m officially here in Metropolis to meet with the head of LuthorCorp’s Human Resources. Plant 3 follows company policy in most areas, but there are some disturbing addendums about bereavement leave.”

Brady cursed again. “If he’s being so brazen, why come to me? Lionel might own all the cops in Kansas, but there must be a few feds who could bring him in.”

“They’d bring him in for questioning, and then let him make a few phone calls to cover his tracks better. I want proof first, of what he’s doing with the teens after their breakdowns, of how he’s keeping people quiet, of how he’s collecting the meteorite, notes from experiments, anything you can find.” The way he’d presented the facts should point Brady towards his father and the psychotic mutants instead of Clark with his powers or Lana with her spells. Chloe Sullivan wouldn’t raise suspicions until her Midas effect set in, and as much as he liked Gabe, he wouldn’t protect the man’s daughter if she murdered anyone. It was the best he could do; telling an investigator to stay away from certain people was like painting a target on them.

“Say I do decide to dig up dirt for you, Luthor. Do you have any advice?” 

“Don’t get caught. Listen to everything; the craziest stories are the ones with a body count in Smallville. I’ll be out of town this weekend, so do some research and check in with me at the Plant on Tuesday if you decide to take the job. If you decide to turn your back on this, don’t look at the obituary section too closely for the next few years, for your own peace of mind.”

Brady drained his beer and left while Lex stayed to finish his slice of pizza and settle the bill, tipping the waiter double.

As he headed to the meeting with HR, Lex spotted a taxi tailing him. He hoped it was Brady.

* * *

_Just tell me how I got this far._

* * *

Dad was shouting too loudly to hear Clark open the door. “He’s taking advantage of Clark’s trust! I knew it! I knew from the moment he ran over Clark that he was just like his father! Typical Luthor, swearing a life debt to your face and stabbing you in the back!”

“Johnathan, stop!” Mom sounded mad, too. Clark decided not to let them know he was home. 

“What, you want to defend him? You want me to give him a chance to figure it all out?”

“No, I want you to stop yelling and come up with a plan.”

“I have a plan. I’m loading my rifle and if Lex comes around with any meteors I’m going to shoot him. I can say I thought he was a burglar. The police will back me up. Everyone in town knows what kind of person he is.” 

“He’s not going to come here to hurt Clark.”

“What, because he’s a good man and this is all a big misunderstanding?” Dad’s voice was quieter, but no less angry.

“No, because he knows you’d shoot him! If he knows about Clark’s secret, there are a dozen ways he could use it without coming near us. He could sell it to the papers, or let the government know, or try to gain Clark’s trust so he can use his powers.”

Dad growled something that sounded like “Kidnap Clark from school, cut him open to see how he works.”

Mom made an exasperated sound. “Fine, assume the worst if you want to. It doesn’t change the fact that carrying around a rifle won’t protect Clark.”

“It will if I go over to the mansion myself.” What?

“Even if we knew for certain that he was trying to use Clark’s secret against him, even if you could do it without getting arrested, how are you going to stop Lionel from finding out it was us?”

No. This wasn’t right. It shouldn’t have been ‘We might not get away with it’ or ‘It isn’t necessary _yet_.’ The living room was silent. He blinked into X-ray involuntarily, and watched Dad’s skeleton settle onto the couch next to Mom’s. She rested her head on his shoulder, and he took her hand.

When Dad finally spoke it was in a much calmer voice. “We could move.”

Mom sat up to face him. “You love the farm,” she protested. “It’s been in your family since Kansas became a state.”

“The only thing I love is you and Clark. You’re my family, and you mean more to me than anything.”

Clark quietly stepped back onto the porch. This was all wrong. 

* * *

_It's hard to think that you might not be real._

* * *

_“I love your scolding as much as your smile. I love the way you hold enemies and friends alike to your own standard of righteousness and refuse to back down until we rise to your expectations. I am in awe of your faith and how you use it to shape the world. I love your gentleness and your strength, your courage and your light. I love you, Alexander, and I have since the first time you saved me.”_

_Alexander scowled in confusion. “Then why will you not stay by my side as my brother?” he demanded._

_“Because you do not love me, my king.” The confession spilled forth from the depths of Hephaestion’s heart. “I fear the gods cannot love as we mortals do.” _

_“Nonsense!” Alexander protested. “All the students of Miza are my dear friends, and I will one day marry the beautiful Roxanne. Of course I love.”_

_“Aristotle told you the value of friends and wives,” his companion corrected, “and he personally approved of each.”_

_“Yet I care for them deeply.”_

_“You care for them diligently and rule them gently, but this is not the love of one mortal for another.”_

“What do you think?” Lex called from the doorway, nonchalantly loosening his tie. “Do I have a future as a novelist?”

“Lex! I was just, um,” Clark fumbled. Here to drop off the produce? No, he delivered to Lex on Wednesdays, not Tuesdays, and Lex made a point of remembering his schedule.

Lex smiled. “Relax, Clark. If I didn’t want anyone reading it, I would have burned it.” Lex always smiled when he saw Clark, no matter where they were or how busy he was. It made Clark feel bigger somehow, or maybe just more comfortable with his size, the way Lex always seemed happy to find him taking up space. The curve of his lips seemed a little too wide today, though, his gaze a little too assessing. “You up for a drive?”

“Um…” Mom and Dad would be worried enough that he’d gone back to the mansion to look for clues, never mind Lex catching him in the act. He couldn't imagine how his parents would feel about them driving off somewhere.

“How about a walk, then?” Clark didn't answer, but Lex dropped his jacket and tie onto a chair by the door and strode back into the hall. Clark followed.

“You didn’t tell me what you thought of the story,” Lex offered.

“I didn’t read much.” They seemed to be heading towards the east wing, completely opposite the tool shed with the meteorite. He’d think they were headed to the room he was storing the Porsche in, except they stayed on the ground floor. “I saw the names ‘Aristotle’ and ‘Alexander.’ I didn’t know Alexander the Great was supposed to be a god.”

“When he started taking over lands outside Macedonia, his mother told everyone that she had conceived him after been struck by a bolt of Zeus’s lightning, so his conquest would be seen as having divine blessing. Nothing beats a good PR campaign.” 

Outside the east wing was mostly gravel, with a few mums planted at the base of a sundial. Beyond the wrought iron fence lay acres of lawn, a helicopter pad, and eventually the cornfields that marked the edge of the Riley’s property. 

Once Lex had led Clark away from the house, he slowed down his pace. “So, Clark, to what do I owe the pleasure?”

This time, Clark was ready for the question. “I just wanted to see how you were doing.”

Lex quirked an eyebrow. “Oh, you know, keeping busy,” he replied. 

This was all wrong. Lex was supposed to be filling the space with sly wit and burning regard. He was supposed to offer Clark trucks and advice, stories of his tragic childhood and vision of a shared future. He wasn’t supposed to stand there wearing a nonchalant posture like armor, guarding his words.

“I’m relieved my Sunday-night meltdown didn’t make the Ledger.”

Clark winced. “I don’t think anyone saw that.”

Another false smile. “You did.” 

“I wouldn’t tell anyone,” Clark protested.

Lex nodded agreeably. “How’s your father taking it?”

Clark’s eyes widened in realization. “Not great.” He paused a moment, awaiting some cutting response. 

“It’s alright, Clark,” Lex assured him, “I wouldn’t ask you to lie to your parents for me.” He opened the gate to a stone path, expression thoughtful. “I’ve been meaning to apologize, actually. I’m worried that I may have put you in an awkward position.” Was he admitting to tricking Clark? “Playing football isn’t the be-all-end-all of high school.”

Huh?

“I’m sorry if I pressured you into joining the team against your father’s wishes.” Lex watched him with piercing curiosity. “Or was that the lovely Miss Lang?”

“No, I’d been wanting to do it already, before I talked with you guys, remember? Dad was a quarterback. Just because I have,” he paused, chose his words, “But it ended up not fitting with my schedule. I have chores around the farm.”

Lex nodded like the response meant more to him than Clark had intended. He needed to find some way to bring up the octagon. “And, you know, sometimes I could use the extra time to pull city slickers out of cornfields.” Lame. “You promise that was a one-time thing?”

Lex didn’t even pause. “I promise. Next time can be your turn again.”

“Good.” He wasn’t going to get a better opening. “Finding that silver thing helped, then?”

“More than you can imagine,” Lex agreed. “Thank you.”

“What was it, anyway?” Clark pressed. 

Lex’s foot caught on the paving stone and he almost missed a step. They walked a minute before he responded. “Why are you asking now instead of Sunday night?”

_ Because Sunday you said it had something to do with your family and that’s a hard topic for you, but now I think you were lying.  _ “I would’ve asked then, but you were drunk.” He wished he’d known to ask then. Today Lex was keeping a firm guard on his words, and he might have been less controlled under the alcohol.

Lex scoffs. “In vino veritas, Clark.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that the disk was an antique bottle opener. Or here’s one you may have heard of: quid pro quo.” 

Lex was angry. Why was  _ Lex _ angry, when he was the one who had lied to trick Clark into giving him a piece of  _ his  _ ship? Why did Lex have to get involved in this? Why couldn’t he just be his friend? “I know you have meteors in your tool shed.” 

Lex paled, his eyes going wide. Ha, take that, Lex wasn’t the only one who could know things he shouldn’t. He reached towards Clark, and Clark braced himself to pantomime getting punched or whatever else Lex was about to try. A hand landed on his shoulder. Gently? It seemed gentle, though he wasn’t the best judge.

“Sit down. Are you alright? How long ago were you exposed?” Lex pulled him down onto a bench, crouched down and peered in his eyes, then sat beside him to hold his hand, flipping it over so he could see the inside of his wrist and brushing his fingertips across the veins. “I’m so sorry, Clark, I didn’t think you’d come today. The produce delivery isn’t until tomorrow.” 

Lex’s free hand moved from Clark’s wrist to his shoulder again, fluttering like he worried that one more reassuring squeeze might pop his arm right off. Even Mom and Dad didn’t get this freaked out when he ran into the meteor rocks, and they’d seen him when his skin went all gross and rippling. Clark was so confused. “Lex, please, just tell me what’s going on.”

Lex seemed to decide that Clark wasn’t about to die, because he stood up from the bench they’d been sharing. He went to the opposite side of the path and spent a long moment scrutinizing Clark like a stranger. “What do you know about Norse mythology?”

“The vikings?” What did that have to do with anything? “I know about the Valkyries; some German composer made an opera about them with a really dramatic song.” Lex waited. “And the gods are the Asgard, and one’s named Thor. He had a hammer.” 

“And have you heard of Baldr?” he pressed.

Clark shook his head, waiting.

“ _ He is best, and all praise him,”  _ Lex quoted softly, as though it pained him.  _ “He is so fair of feature, and so bright, that light shines from him. _ ” Clark looked down, flushing without really knowing why. “Legend says his ship, Hringhorni, is the best ever built. I wonder how far someone could go, in a ship like that.” And just as suddenly, he was cold. 

“Lex,” he pleaded, not really knowing what to say. 

It didn’t matter. Lex kept talking. “Baldr’s mother loved him so much that she made him invulnerable to everything on Earth, except mistletoe. He’s invincible except for that one green sprig. I’m sure you can guess what happens next.”

Clark turned towards the mansion, and the west courtyard beyond it with its tool shed. “Someone finds some mistletoe,” he murmured.

Lex nodded. “So says the _Codex Regius_. One day Loki, god of mischief, will use mistletoe to kill Baldr. This tragedy will lead to another and another, and the world will end. Monsters will roam the earth.” Lex paused after his pronouncement as though waiting for Clark to recognize it. And monsters roaming the earth did seem a little familiar. “The sky will split in two.” The sky had split in two back in 1989, spitting out green rocks and one tiny ship. “The Sons of Muspell will ride through the tear, surrounded in fire, wielding a weapon brighter than the sun.” Weapons? He hadn’t brought any weapons with him. He’d never needed any. “Heaven and earth will be laid to waste.”  _ Not if I can help it, _ Clark denied. Then again, maybe he was supposed to be dead by that point? He’d lost track a few metaphors back. 

“People always go on about how absurd the Greek myths are, but Ragnarok…” Lex trailed off, staring into the middle distance. After an endless moment, he dragged his hand over his scalp and shook his head. “The Norse know exactly what will happen, but they don’t stop it. They might have been able to dig out the mistletoe, burn it, rip it from every branch and log, but they never even tried.” The man turned back to face Clark, eyes seeming to search for something. “How could anyone see that their world was about to be destroyed and not do something about it?” he pleaded.

Clark stood. “I should go home.”

Lex did nothing to stop him. “Tell your father that I’m not going to hurt you,” he called after him. “I know he won’t believe the word of a Luthor, but tell him anyway.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title and page breaks are from [Everywhere](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLCasyAh7ic), Michelle Branch's debut single released 2001.


End file.
